Riot Games
Design for League of Legends’s Mid-Season Invitational
( Services )
- Customer experience
Launched in 2009 by Riot Games, League of Legends (LoL) is a multiplayer online video game with a vast global fanbase. In 2023, LoL boasted an average of over 10 million concurrent players.
Hosted in a different city every May, LoL’s Mid-Season Invitational (MSI) tournament is a vibrant live spectacle held in huge arenas, with online figures peaking at 2.8 million viewers (MSI 24). Studio Dumbar/DEPT® created an all-encompassing design package for MSI 24 in Chengdu, China.
Design strategy
The design package had to be rigorous and robust: a host of different vendors would work with it before and during the tournament and across multiple touchpoints. It had to be expansive too, encompassing a staggering number of templates and assets for motion, socials, print, event graphics, and more.
MSI 24 was defined by the tagline, Become the Unknown. To support this, Riot Games sought visuals with a mysterious, dangerous, powerful tone. This attitude became the guiding principle for the work.
Design framework
The team devised a powerful and engaging framework for visuals: bold, expressive typography; a primary color palette dominated by black and red; Journey Data visuals resembling a futuristic, Ul-inspired textural layer; and Empyrean Shapes – graphic icons inspired by LoL lore.
They created a rich and immersive motion language. The Aberration – a graphic interpretation of the Unknown – can be slow and ominous, sporadic and reactive, or linear and up-tempo, depending on the application’s requirements. Organic and spectral, The Aberration provided a consistent thread throughout the visual identity. Along with The Aberration, they modeled and animated the first LoL champion, Nocturne.
Expansive, electrifying identity
Studio Dumbar/DEPT® delivered a fool-proof package with in-depth guidelines, assets, and templates to service the many outside vendors working on MSI 24. The scope and rigor of the design package ensured a rich and seamlessly branded framework for the tournament, both online and offline — from a motion-led campaign on social media, through live online broadcasts and onwards, to the final showdown.
